Part of that initiative is the magazine's decision to open up its
archives (2007 to present as well as selected pieces) to the
general public for the rest of the summer. Until the website puts
up its metered paywall sometime in the fall, the New Yorker
editors will be
releasing curated collections of stories periodically.

We pulled out a selection of our favorite stories from the
archives that you should definitely check out while they're free.

German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt examined nothing
short of the nature of evil in her 1961 reporting on the trial of
Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann. In her dispatches — which many
have called a masterpiece — Arendt coined the phrase "the
banality of evil" to describe Eichmann, who she contended was not
a "monster" but "terribly and terrifyingly normal." While
some have since criticized her conclusions about Eichmann,
her work still forms the basis for much of our understanding of
the Nazi apparatus.

From the first dispatch:

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as "normal."
"More normal at any rate, than I am after having examined him,"
one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found
that Eichmann's whole psychological outlook, including his
relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father,
his brothers and sisters and friends, was "not only normal, but
most desirable … Behind the comedy of the soul, experts lay the
hard fact that Eichmann's was obviously no case of moral
insanity.

A huge expanse of ruins
left the explosion of the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 in
Hiroshima. 140,000 people died because of the disastrous
explosion.AP

A little more than one year after the U.S. dropped the atomic
bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, The New Yorker dedicated
an entire issue to a single article. It was a startling choice
necessitated by one of the most momentous acts of destruction in
history. In a bid to force its readers to consider "the terrible
implications" of the atomic bomb, The New Yorker's John Hersey
followed the stories of six survivors immediately prior to the
bombing until one year after the bombing. The issue was an
unrivaled success. It sold out on newsstands in hours, radio
networks broadcast readings of the story with well-known actors,
and it became an instant best-seller.

From Hersey:

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb and
these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they
lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small
items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to
go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next – that
spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival, he
lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he
would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

Activist and author Rachel
Carson, whose book "Silent Spring" led to a study of pesticides,
testifies before a Senate Government Operations Subcommittee in
Washington, D.C. on June 4, 1963.AP
Photo

Few books have had the kind of effect that Rachel Carson's
"Silent Spring" had when it was released in 1962. The book, which
documented the deleterious effect that widespread use of
pesticides have on the environment, was actually first serialized
in The New Yorker in June 1962. Carson's work directly led to the
modern environmental movement in the U.S. as well the ban of the
destructive insecticide DDT. Carson's work played a large role in
the creation of the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967 and the
Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

From Carson:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present
century has one species — man — acquired significant power to
alter the nature of the world.

This is a 2003 file image
obtained by The Associated Press which shows an unidentified
detainee standing on a box with a bag on his head and wires
attached to him in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad,
Iraq.AP Photo

Though abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq were reported by the
media as early as November 2003, it wasn't until dueling reports
came out from "60 Minutes" and The New Yorker in 2004 that the
scandal was blown wide open. Investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh (who
made his career by recording another major abuse by the U.S.
military) went deep into Abu Ghraib to uncover just how far
up the chain of command the abuses went. Hersh revealed that the
scandal wasn't an isolated incident (as the Army wanted to
portray), but an example of an interrogation program ("Copper
Green") that was an official and systemic use of torture.

From Hersh:

As the
international furor grew, senior military officers, and President
Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the
conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however,
amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the
failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he
draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the
Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of
the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army
military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees.
Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by
intimidation and torture, was the priority.

Though many in the international community knew about the
devastation wrought by the Hutus on the Tutsis in Rwanda, New
Yorker journalist Philip Gourevitch brought the tragedy into full
focus. A year after the Rwandan genocide ended, Gourevitch began
traveling to Rwanda for months at a time to try to understand the
genocide. He eventually filed eight lengthy articles that covered
the story from nearly every angle — Tutsi survivors, imprisoned
Hutu killers, the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front, and Major
General Paul Kagame, who later became president. Though
Gourevitch has
more recently been criticized for his supposedly easy treatment
of Kagame, his early dispatches are incredibly revealing
stories about how a country begins to heal after a genocide.

From the first dispatch:

As I traveled around the country, collecting accounts of the
killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the
nail-studded club, a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts
of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made
the neutron bomb obsolete. Then I came across a man in a market
butchering a cow with a machete, and I saw that it was hard
work. His big, precise strokes made a sharp hacking noise, and it
took many hacks—two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop through
the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?

The New Yorker's best-known story form is perhaps the profile.
While there are certainly any number of excellent pieces to
choose from, New Yorker editor David Remnick's 1998 profile of a
middle-aged Muhammad Ali may be his most memorable. Riddled with
Parkinson's, the older Ali tries to make sense of his early years
to figure out how "a gangly kid from segregated Louisville willed
himself to become one of the great original improvisers in
American History."

From Remnick:

Ali still walked well. He was still powerful in the arms and
across the chest; it was obvious, just from shaking his hand,
that he still possessed a knockout punch. For him, the special
torture was speech and expression, as if the disease had
intentionally struck first at what had once please him —and had
pleased (or annoyed) the world — most. He hated the effort that
speech now cost him.

Jane Mayer's 2009 expose of the CIA's increasing use of drones to
kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan revealed that while many in
the American public were aware of the drones, few understood that
there are two drone programs. The first is a conventional U.S.
military program. The second is a clandestine C.I.A.-run
targeted-killing program that represents an unprecedented
expansion of force in sovereign nations like Pakistan, Yemen, and
Libya. Mayer's account revealed how the drone program has become
a "radically new and geographically unbounded use of
state-sanctioned lethal force," that ultimately signals an
endless state of war.

From Mayer:

At first, some intelligence experts were uneasy about drone
attacks. In 2002, Jeffrey Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel,
told Seymour M. Hersh, for an article in this magazine, “If
they’re dead, they’re not talking to you, and you create more
martyrs.” And, in an interview with the
Washington Post, Smith said that ongoing drone
attacks could “suggest that it’s acceptable behavior to
assassinate people. . . . Assassination as a norm of
international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans
overseas.”

Seven years later, there is no longer any doubt that targeted
killing has become official U.S. policy. “The things we were
complaining about from Israel a few years ago we now embrace,”
Solis says. Now, he notes, nobody in the government calls it
assassination.

In November 1957, The New Yorker presented a profile that
featured one of the most interesting pairings in American media.
Legendary writer Truman Capote was contracted to interview actor
Marlon Brando, both of whom were just entering their respective
primes. The result is a candid portrait that many consider to be
a textbook example of how to reveal the inner life of a
notoriously guarded figure.

The voice went on, as though speaking to hear itself, an effect
Brando’s speech often has, for, like many persons who are
intensely self-absorbed, he is something of a monologuist—a fact
that he recognizes and for which he offers his own
explanation. “People around me never say anything,” he says.
“They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That’s why I
do all the talking.”